Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“And, what — you failed?”

Now it’s Frank Saberhagen’s turn to wallow in silence.

“My last fight I lost to a pipefitter from Coldwater,” I say.

“Didn’t have to be your last.”

“We fought at the Lucky Bingo. The whatever it is, scoreboard, was still lit up from the last game that afternoon. B-17. I-52. He drove up on a Saturday. No cutman. No cornerman. By himself. Knocked me out Saturday night and drove home Sunday. He was back fitting pipes Monday morning. I was never going to be the middleweight champ. Not of the world. Not of anyplace.”

“You’ll never convince me of that.”

Ride the horse until it dies . A phrase you’ll hear around clubs. It’s often spoken by trainers behind their boxers’ backs. Ride the horse until it cannot prove its worth or meet its stable costs. If it’s not dead, cut it loose. The bloody unvarnished truth of what happens everyday in many walks of life. You wish that horse no ill will but business is business.

Truth is, I could accept and even get behind that reasoning. But it’s nine shades of brutal when your own father’s your jockey.

“I was a boxer like the guy who strums guitar Monday nights at Starbucks is a musician.”

“You’ll never get me to see it that way.”

“Yeah, Dad. I know.”

Workkeeps me on the road. I fly to Hawaii to watch fifteen rust-acned fishing trawlers get dynamited off the coast to serve as fish habitats; it earned the cardholder several million points when written off as a charitable donation. To London for the sale of Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”—a thresher shark preserved in 4,666 gallons of formaldehyde — at Harrod’s. To Florida to cut up Conrad Black’s card. I take exquisite joy in this. When American Express dispatched me to hand-deliver his card years ago, Conrad held it against his chest. “Black”—tucking it into his shirt pocket—“on Black.” I laughed, as I’d assumed was his expectation. He told me not to act like a “jumped-up little twerp and sycophant.” I was later dispatched to oversee his purchase of Bonkers, a Glen of Imaal Terrier that cost 750,000 British pounds. Conrad bought it for his second wife, who fussed over it all of three weeks before offloading it on one of the Puerto Rican housekeepers at their Palm Beach estate.

Diverse legal imbroglios prevent Black being present to hand his card over. I cut it in half in front of his assistant, a wet-behind-the-ears Vassar grad— then into quarters and eighths and sixteenths until it looks as if it passed through a wood-chipper. An act which I find insanely gratifying.

NextI see my father we’re faced across his kitchen table. I’ve come directly from the airport spurred by his strung-out voicemail message. Between us: a styrofoam cooler with ORGANIC MATERIAL on the lid.

Black rings like washers circumference Frank’s eyes. I’d guess he’s been crying but I’ve never actually seen Franklin Saberhagen cry.

“It showed up this morning. I decided I’d better drive Dylan up to his mom’s for the weekend.”

“You better not have been…”

“God damn, Nick.” Running a hand through the wet ropes of his hair. “A little credit?”

“You’re sweating—”

“I haven’t touched a drop. That’s why I’m sweating.”

I lift the cooler lid. A cloud of dry ice vapour. I see what’s inside. I close the lid.

“Sensitive biological material,” Dad says. “They’ll degrade shortly.”

“For…?”

“Yeah. They’re from the Eye Bank… an anonymous donor. You drive.”

Streetlights strobe the car windows to illuminate the contours of Dad’s havocked face. The cooler sits in his lap. I cut through the orchards. At a pumpkin stand a woebegone Canada goose stands like a sentinel on a frozen squash.

“OR room four,” he says as I drive. “Teaching lab. We’ll put on scrubs, wheel her in ourselves—”

“Ourselves?”

“You’re my assistant.”

“If we get caught?”

“Seeing as I’m suspended? Jail. I was probably going, anyway. You’re that worried?”

“Who are you all of a sudden, Montgomery Clift? Just shut up.”

Service elevator to the fifth floor. When I try to pull scrubs over my street clothes my father tells me it’s not a bloody snowsuit. We wheel a gurney into the elevator and on into Abby’s room. She’s sleeping. Dad injects her with ketamine so she won’t wake up. I grasp her feet, Dad under her armpits. An awful smell, which Dad identifies as burst bedsores.

Up in the OR, Dad runs instruments through the autoclave, fills a syringe with local, selects suture thread so thin the plastic pouch containing it appears empty. The ticking tinnitus of strange machines. An acrid undernote my father says is burnt bone dust. He dons glasses I’ve never seen him in: Buddy Holly style, magnified lenses screwed into the lower hubs.

He removes the eyes from the cooler. White balls threaded with burst capillaries, ocular stems attached, in a vacuum-sealed bag. They roll into a surgical tureen. With a dexterity I’ve rarely seen, he slices round their base and tweezes up the topmost layer. He holds one up on the scalpel’s tip: invisible but for their rainbow refraction in the lights. Inserts the tip of a syringe below Abby’s eyes. Bubbles where local collects beneath her skin. Further injections behind the cups of bone holding each eye. He has me hold her eyelids open while inserting ocular spreaders.

With a cookie-cutter instrument he traces the circumference of Abby’s eyes. “Sweat,” he says. “Damn it, Nick, sweat .” I dab his forehead with a swatch of surgical gauze. He tweezes out Abby’s destroyed corneas. Deposits them on her cheeks. The blue of Abby’s eyes too blue: this quivering naked vibrancy. He shapes the donor corneas until they are of acceptable size. Lays them over her eyeballs. Stitches fresh corneas to the edges of old. Gently clears away the blood occluding her eyes. The useless corneas are still stuck to her cheeks. He pinches them between his fingers. When they stick to his fingertips he blows as one does at an eyelash to make a wish. Twin scintillas land on the floor, lost on the tiles like contact lenses. Dad grins. Walleyed and a bit batty-looking behind those giant lenses.

Afterwards I idle on the sidewalk. Smoker’s row: patients, orderlies, nurses filing a concrete abutment. In wheelchairs and hospital blues, dragging vital sign monitors and oxygen tanks. A snatch of a song comes to me: The saddest thing that I ever saw / Was smokers outside the hospital doors .

A guy stands in light shed by the ambulance bay. Shuffling along the halogen-lit brickwork. His fly is unzipped and his shirt’s buttoned all wrong. His hair — long, the last time I’d seen him — was razed to the scalp. I walk over.

“Hey, how are you?”

Colin Hill offers me the most open, beatific smile.

“How do you do?”

He speaks as if a baffler down his belly prevents him from raising his voice. Slack features. Shaving cream crusted in his ear-holes. His smile goes on and on and on.

“We lived on Sarah Court,” I tell him. “As kids.”

He rubs a palm over his scalp as you do a foot that’s gone to sleep. The muscles mooring his jaw tense. The frustrated noise he makes is, I’m guessing, laughter.

“I remember.” He extends both hands in front of him, palms facing me, touching his thumbs then spreading his arms to their furthest ambit. The sort of panoramic gesture a shady condominium developer makes to encompass vacant swampland where he plans a timeshare resort. “I remember… everything.”

My euphoria sours. Colin faces the wall again. He hunts until he finds what he’d lost: a ladybug crawling in the grouting. He slips a pinkie finger into the gap. The bug perches on his nail. We’re approached by an old man in a housecoat and winter boots.